FDA releases new science supporting BPA safety

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has released extensive new documentation that further supports and substantiates the agency’s assessment that BPA is safe. The FDA is the government agency whose scientists are in charge of assessing the safety of BPA in food contact materials such as polycarbonate plastic and epoxy can linings.

Last week, FDA released five scientific documents that together provide full details of FDA’s safety assessment of BPA. Along with an overview of the assessment, which is focused on exposure and toxicology studies, the other four documents provide detailed supporting analyses of relevant studies on BPA. These include FDA’s own research studies on BPA as well as hundreds of studies published in the scientific literature. These new documents are all available through links on FDA’s main webpage on BPA, which provides a concise overview of the basis for FDA’s clear statement that BPA is safe.

The overall FDA safety perspective continues to be:

FDA’s current perspective, based on its most recent safety assessment, is that BPA is safe at the current levels occurring in foods. Based on FDA’s ongoing safety review of scientific evidence, the available information continues to support the safety of BPA for the currently approved uses in food containers and packaging.

As reported in the news media, the agency said it reached that conclusion based on a four-year review of more than 300 scientific studies. From that review, FDA established margin of safety values for real-life human exposures that are well above the value typically used to determine safety. This wide margin of safety provides the substantive support for FDA’s conclusion that BPA is safe. In addition, the value typically used to determine safety was acknowledged to be overly-conservative for BPA based on extensive scientific data, which indicates that the margin of safety for BPA is even greater than reported.